Читать книгу Because You Loved Me - M. William Phelps - Страница 23

While Chris McGowan stood outside of Jeanne’s home, a detective wandered over and asked him a few pointed questions. When Chris had called 911, he had initiated an investigation. Information that could be important to finding Jeanne’s killer needed to be documented immediately. Chris might know something central to the case without realizing it. Also, as far as detectives knew, Chris McGowan was their prime suspect.

Beyond the initial “who are you?” and “what’s your date of birth?” Chris wasn’t pressured to answer any tough questions relating to the murder scene. Detectives could tell he was not in his best frame of mind.

“Everything was moving so fast,” recalled Chris. “I was stumbling through my words. I had no idea what was going on.”

There was going to come a time, detectives promised, when Chris sat down and, in a sense, defended himself. He wasn’t going to walk away without explaining a few things, which, early on, didn’t seem to add up.

Standing in front of the window in her living room, Carla Hall was mortified at the thought that her friend and neighbor, a woman who ostensibly had no enemies, lay dead on her kitchen floor, her killer at large. For a moment, Carla stared out the window and shook her head. Yellow crime-scene tape. Police officers. The scene looked like some sort of CSI TV drama. Spotlights illuminating the property, casting an eerie football stadium gaze on everyone.

Incredible. What is happening?

Neighbors gathered in the street and talked as police came and went. Dumaine Avenue was clogged with crime scene investigation box trucks and evidence vans. Uniformed officers banged on doors, asked questions, took statements. Jeanne’s ex-husband became the most popular topic of conversation among many standing out front. It was no secret Anthony Kasinskas had been in trouble with the law.

He and Jeanne, more than one person later noted, were at odds constantly. Jeanne was terrified of him.

There was no doubt Jeanne had developed high anxiety where Anthony was concerned. She called neighbors during the day when the kids were home and asked them to go look in on the children. Her biggest fear, several neighbors reported, was that Anthony showed up unannounced.

“Do you see anything going on over there?” Jeanne asked. “Is everything OK?”

“She would call me,” recalled one neighbor, “two or three times a day sometimes and ask me to check in on the kids. She would make a point to say she was scared Anthony was going to ‘do something.’ She called less frequently when Chris started staying overnight, but she was still frightened of Anthony.”

“Terrified is more like it,” said another friend. “She always thought that he would kill her. She believed it.”

When Anthony and Jeanne divorced, Jeanne made it clear that she wanted to drop his name and went to court to change her last name back to Dominico. She gave the kids the option to do the same, never pressuring them, and both chose to keep their dad’s name.

Still, would Anthony go as far as to murder his ex-wife? It didn’t seem logical. In the eyes of detectives, Anthony was an obvious suspect—and prosecutors later said that indeed Anthony had a bull’s-eye on his back immediately.

There was one instance where Anthony had fired a shotgun—a warning shot—in the air as someone walked toward his car while he was hunting. The guy turned out to be a cop. Anthony was arrested.

But had Jeanne been murdered by a firearm? By this point, detectives weren’t willing to offer those sorts of details. Save for a few detectives and crime scene investigators inside the house, no one knew how Jeanne had been murdered. Not even Chris.

As Carla stood by the window, Jeanne’s death was sobering and numbing. What was Nicole going to do when she found out?

“Nicole’s going to die when she finds out her mother is dead,” Carla had told one of the officers nearby, before she had been allowed back into her home. Now she was worried how Nicole was going to react. Nicole was prone to depression. Although she and Jeanne hadn’t gotten along well lately, Carla believed Nicole loved her mother. She was likely out with Billy, Carla thought, driving around town, just being a kid, spending her final night with her boyfriend. This, while her life was being turned upside down back at home and she didn’t even know it.

“I believed Nicole was a sweet girl,” Carla said later. “Jeannie worked hard to provide for those kids….”

Carla couldn’t sit still. She ran outside for a moment and told police again: “You’ve got to find Jeanne’s daughter and son, Drew and Nicole.”

Some of the neighbors congregated outside insisted that Drew was at a friend’s house and was due to come home anytime now. What was going to happen when he walked in on all of this?

“You’ve got to find Nicole,” Carla said again. Then she asked one of the officers standing closer to her driveway, “Was this a random attack? Should we be worried? I’m home alone over here.”

“We can’t really give you any information, ma’am. We don’t know who it is. But don’t be worried. OK?”

After that, Carla returned home and called Donna. She was still distressed.

“I can’t believe this, Carla. I cannot believe it.”

“I know, Donna. I know.”

“Come over here.”

Carla walked across the street and sat with Donna for a while. While consoling each other, they discussed a group of kids Drew had been hanging around with that summer. Donna later said the kids were known around the neighborhood to be “bad kids always getting into trouble.” She wondered if perhaps one of the kids tried to burgle Jeanne’s house and fought with Jeanne.

“I never once thought Drew was involved, but the kids he hung around with were always getting into trouble. That was one of the reasons why Drew and Jeanne were, at the time of her death, butting heads so much.”

Yet that theory quickly dissolved after two police officers stopped by Donna’s house and asked if she and Carla had seen anything peculiar earlier that day.

“No,” both women said.

Donna had even walked through Jeanne’s yard somewhere between 6:00 and 6:30 P.M. to go get one of her kids at the day care facility adjacent to the back of Jeanne’s house.

“It was easy to cut through Jeanne’s yard,” recalled Donna, “and Jeanne certainly didn’t mind. But I didn’t see anything at the time I walked through.”

“Can you come into the station with one of our officers to answer a few questions? Just routine stuff.”

“OK,” Donna said.

It was well after eight o’clock. Donna made sure her children were taken care of before she left.

Outside Jeanne’s house, in the front yard and down the street, the crowd—uniform police officers and detectives, medics, neighbors—had swelled with curious onlookers. One officer took Donna by the arm and led her through a group of people standing around, wondering what was going on. As they walked, Drew emerged from the crowd; he had just returned home.

“What’s going on, Donna?” Drew asked when he saw Donna walking with the officer. Like everyone else, the boy was confused. The flashing lights. Crime scene tape. Police asking questions, directing traffic.

“What’s going on?”

Donna and the officer stood by a police cruiser she was going to travel to the Nashua Police Department (NPD) in and didn’t react to Drew’s query.

“Donna, where’s my mom? I want to see my mom,” Drew said.

Donna dropped her head. She started to say something, but had trouble getting the words out. “Just as I began to talk, the officer ducked me into the cruiser and closed the door. I never had a chance,” she added through tears, “to say anything to poor Drew.”

Within seconds, Donna was on her way to the Nashua Police Department. She was panic-stricken by that point. What was going to happen after she left? she wondered. What was Drew going to do when he found out about Jeanne? And Nicole. Poor Nicole, Donna thought. The girl was going to “freak out” when she realized her mother had been murdered.